On July 12, 2015, Paul Castaway was shot and killed by Denver police while holding a knife to his own throat. The police initially claimed that Castaway, a mentally ill Indigenous man, had charged at them with a knife after stabbing his own mother in the neck. Surveillance footage would later contradict those claims and support the accounts of Castaway’s family and other witnesses, who have maintained that Castaway menaced no one but himself with the knife in his hand, and never charged police.

Police later amended their version of events, acknowledging that Castaway never attacked his mother.

Castaway’s death, the dishonesty of officials and the local prosecutor’s refusal to press charges are not, in and of themselves, extraordinary circumstances. Native people in the United States are statistically more likely to be killed by police than people of any other ethnic group, and mentally ill people are frequently on the receiving end of police violence. The refusal of the Denver district attorney’s office to press charges against police accused of an unlawful shooting – a tradition that the city has upheld since 1993 – is also a common occurrence in the United States. But in Castaway’s case, something unusual did occur: a surge of public awareness.

In 1978, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indan Tribe, declaring that American Indian Nations could no longer exercise jurisdiction over non-native offenders who commit crimes on tribal lands. Although the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act (“VAWA”) in March 2013 restores a portion of the jurisdiction that Oliphant stripped away to American Indian Nations, VAWAspecifically excludes 228 federally recognized tribes in Alaska. Consequently, as a result of Section 910 of VAWA 2013, Alaska Native women remain the only group of Native women whose tribal governments cannot protect them. To learn more, read: www.sliverofafullmoon.org

The Tule River Reservation was established in 1873 by a US Executive Order in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It is south of Fresno and north of Bakersfield. It occupies 55,356 acres. -Wikipedia

“This short documentary profiles the last fluent speaker of Wukchumni, a Native American language, and her creation of a comprehensive dictionary.” -NY Times